What I meant was...

 In round 2 of the CCF Easter Open, I played Amit Athawale (109 / 1505) as white. I was happy with that state of affairs, since I had seen from his earlier games in their summer tournaments that he plays the French Defence, and I was still smarting from my feeble loss to FM Nick Frost only 9 days earlier. I've long maintained in jest that white wins against the French by force, solely on the basis of my own good score. The problem is that others have happily reminded me of this, and it is said that if you hear something often enough, even a blatant falsehood, you slowly start to believe it's really true...

 How uncomfortable it was then, after 15 moves of this game, to find myself an exchange down for moreorless nothing. Rather like my previous opponent, I played for an immediate wipeout, an approach that backfired for me even more so than it did for Ball. But like him, I was able to benefit from black never quite pulling the trigger, and finally landed the killing blow myself, quite out of the blue:

 Certainly not the most convincing display I've ever given, struggling to even avoid defeat as white in my favourite mainstream opening against someone who grades claim I should score 100% against over any number of games. An important win though - I dread to wonder what sort of mood I would have been in had I lost. A definite cold shower for my views on the French: I cannot count on happily chopping opponents to pieces in 25 moves, and trying to force the issue here did not go well. This line of the Alekhine-Chatard is proving irksome; I've scored 3.5/4 against 6... h6, and the draw was with a 161 when I was 129, but this was not the first game to feature some nervy moments. Every time I think I've found a line to kill it off it just comes back, but really this is part of a wider problem in that I haven't looked at my French repertoire for a while now - why would I need to? It's easy to get complacent. At least my eye for cheap tactics remains, and so I was able to dig myself out of a hole here.

 Round 3, the final game of Good Friday (alas, not good for my chess!) continued the bouncing between players of divergent strength that typifies my events at CCF.